Spring Creek Project » Spring Creek Projecthttp://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject
for ideas, nature, and the written wordThu, 19 Feb 2015 18:56:26 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.1Owl with a foot-fetishhttp://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/owl-foot-fetish/
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/owl-foot-fetish/#commentsThu, 19 Feb 2015 18:55:12 +0000http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/?p=112(Melissa Hart will read Saturday, February 21, 7:30 at the Corvallis-Benton County Library. We asked her is she would share an excerpt from her new book, Wild Within: How Rescuing Owls Inspired a Family). Jonathan and I ate dinner at home and replaced evenings at the cinema with visits to the raptor center so… Continue reading →

(Melissa Hart will read Saturday, February 21, 7:30 at the Corvallis-Benton County Library. We asked her is she would share an excerpt from her new book, Wild Within: How Rescuing Owls Inspired a Family).

Jonathan and I ate dinner at home and replaced evenings at the cinema with visits to the raptor center so that he could help to train one of the Northern spotted owls, Chenoa.

“Visitors connect better with the birds when they see them outside the mews,” he told me, “and we want them to see the spotteds, in particular, since they’re endangered.”

While he trained I helped out with another shift’s feeding and cleaning and sat outside the great-horned owl’s mew, wondering what it would feel like to walk around with her on my arm. She sat on her perch and triangulated at me, feather tufts poised like my tabby cat’s ears. Once, she opened her beak wide and hacked up a large gray pellet.

“For me?” I laughed. “Oh, you shouldn’t have.”

Jonathan walked down from Chenoa’s mew and kneaded my shoulders. “You’re so in love. Just ask if you can work with her. She’s not gonna hurt you.”

I thought of encephalitis, of wheelchairs, and shook my head.

We left Lorax fixating on the rubber duck in her water trough and walked back up the path to the clinic.

“Careful!” Jean held up a warning hand as we opened the door. “Loose bird!”

Occasionally, volunteers allowed one of the smaller permanent residents to stretch its wings in the clinic. I expected the one-eyed kestrel on the paper-towel holder or a screech owl on the computer monitor. Instead, I looked down to find—mounted on a portable ground perch—a foot-high owl with a round, tuftless head and bright white feathers speckled with black spots. He looked like a cue ball with a beak.

“Kids, meet Archimedes.” Jean stretched her gloved hand toward the bird, poised to grab him if he spooked. The creature’s enormous feathered feet remained gripping the wood-and-Astroturf block.

I remained by the door. “Named for the Greek mathematician? Um . . . his talons are twice as big as Lorax’s.”

Our center had a policy of taking in resident birds native to Oregon. Even I, thanks to our Audubon book at home, knew that the big white owls lived mainly in Canada, Alaska, and Eurasia.

Jean ran a hand through her auburn hair. “Snowies are a gray area. They come down to the lower forty-eight every three or four years to hunt when the lemming population in the Arctic dries up. This guy’s an imprint, though, part of a captive breeding program back east. They couldn’t find a female for him . . .”

“So we got him.” Jonathan bent down to get a closer look. Archimedes clacked his black beak but remained standing on the perch.

I stood silent, staring. At a center where birds came in varying shades of black and tan and brown and white, and sometimes dull red, I’d never seen such an owl. He seemed to glow, lit from within. And he appeared to have a mustache—fluffy feathers cascaded from either side of his beak. He squinted up at me out of slanted yellow eyes that looked too small in his fluffy head and peered at my footwear, a pair of new white running shoes.

Suddenly, he opened his beak and emitted a sound like squeaking bicycle brakes. He scuttled over and jumped on top of my sneakers, spread his vast wings and let out a series of dog-like woofs.

Black talons squeezed my toes. I fought the urge to shriek.

“Jonathan. What . . . what’s he doing?”

Jean knelt and reeled in the nylon leash clipped to the leather jesses around the bird’s ankles. Archimedes stepped panting onto her gloved wrist. “Remember, he’s a human imprint.”

“So why’d he jump on my feet?” I wailed.

Jean grinned at me. “Darlin’, he’s trying to have sex with your shoes.”

“Oh . . . that’s disgusting.”

She laughed, flushed with excitement over the bird. “Harry Potter’s made snowies a big deal. This owl’s gonna be a rock star.”

Jonathan nodded, and I saw a look of longing in his eyes. “So . . . who’s training him?”

“The director’s asked me to work with him. He might’ve been trained at some point—hard to tell. For a while it’ll be just him and me. Then, if I can get him solid on the glove, we can share. Better put him back in his mew now.”

She touched her glove to Archimedes’ legs and he stepped up, but as she took his jesses and stood, he leaped off her arm and hung upside down, twisting and writhing at the end of his straps.

Piercing shrieks filled the clinic. From the treatment room a recovering kestrel screamed. Jean sank to the linoleum, abruptly mournful.

“Here we go again.” She put her free hand on the owl’s smooth white back and guided him—still screaming—to the ground, untangling the jesses from his huge, struggling feet. “If he used to be glove-trained, he isn’t now.”

“How come he doesn’t fly back to your arm like the other birds?” I asked. If a UPS truck rumbled up the driveway while Jonathan stood with Chenoa on the lawn, the spotted would sometimes fly off the glove in a defensive move called a bate. But if Jonathan stood immobile with his arm out, Chenoa flew right back to his glove.

“Snowies are ground nesters,” Jean explained. “If they get scared, they fly downward toward what they think is a safe spot and end up hanging. It’s not safe . . . he could asphyxiate and die.”

She put him in one of the clinic mews and unclipped his jesses, pausing to prod gently around his keel for undigested food.

“What’s he feel like?”

“Like putting your hand inside a down comforter. Want to touch him?”

“No, thanks.” I took a bag of mice from the freezer and set them in the sink to thaw for the nocturnal birds’ dinner. Their brown forms bobbed about in the warm water, thirty tiny, macabre swimmers.

“I’m off to work with Amazon.” Jonathan set a rat on a pie pan and headed up to the golden eagle’s mew.

I began to wash plates and syringes and coffee mugs. Jean spoke over the running water. “I really think,” she said in her meditative drawl, “that you’d make a good bird handler. What d’you say? My offer’s still good—I could teach you to work with Lorax, and maybe someday you could help with Archimedes.”

I turned off the water. The new owl looked like a droll little snowman, albeit a snowman with a foot fetish. Though I knew better, I suspected him of a damned good sense of humor.

“Maybe,” I allowed.

She handed Archimedes a mouse. He took it in his obsidian beak and held it a moment before throwing his head back and swallowing it whole.

“He looks like my college roommate doing a shot of Jägermeister.”

Jean wet a towel and bent to scrub splattered mutes off the floor. “He’s just gotta get solid on the glove. He’s so exotic, visitors are gonna love him.”

“Oh, yeah. He’s amazing.”

If the ardor in my voice surprised her, she didn’t let on. I certainly wasn’t telling anyone just then that I’d fallen madly in love with a foot-fetishistic snowy owl who sported a fluffy mustache.

From Wild Within: How Rescuing Owls Inspired a Family (Lyons, 2014), by Melissa Hart

]]>http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/owl-foot-fetish/feed/0Saving wild species and habitatshttp://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/saving-wild-species-habitats/
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/saving-wild-species-habitats/#commentsTue, 27 Jan 2015 19:35:17 +0000http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/?p=108We asked the Spring Creek community to suggest some things we can all do to help stem the loss of wild species and their habitats, and we received many thoughtful, creative ideas. Some are hands-in-the-dirt pragmatic. Others are more idealistic or theoretical. Since we’ll need to change our minds, our hearts, and our habits to… Continue reading →

We asked the Spring Creek community to suggest some things we can all do to help stem the loss of wild species and their habitats, and we received many thoughtful, creative ideas. Some are hands-in-the-dirt pragmatic. Others are more idealistic or theoretical. Since we’ll need to change our minds, our hearts, and our habits to create a culture that celebrates and supports wild nature, all these suggestions can help.

Here are our top three favorites (which earned their authors a free copy of Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction) and a selection of other great entries. Thanks to all who participated, and thanks for working on behalf of wild nature.

4. Learn to love again the wildness within; then fight anew for the wildness without.
5. Give inherent rights to natural communities to exist, persist, and regenerate their natural cycles in law.
6. Possibly the best way to reduce extinctions is to grow plants and vegetables organically. Pesticides, especially neonicotinoids, kill honey bees. Organic agriculture also diminishes the impacts of GMOs.
7. Redirect money we spend on domestic pets toward guaranteeing wild animals in wild spaces.
8. Abandon tepid incremental approaches and dedicate ourselves to a radical revisioning and restructuring of our political economic system.
9. Abolish the penny and nickel, useless currencies, so we can stop mining for both.
10. Support land trusts and conservancies that preserve, protect, and rehabilitate ‘at-risk’ habitats.
11. Plant more native plants in your backyard to help maintain ecosystems that support local wildlife!
12. Wake up to our fundamental connection to the nonhuman communities and their habitats; their fate is our fate.
13. Talk to your family members who don’t believe in climate change about it, no matter how un-fun the conversation.
14. Reduce your meat consumption and support farmers working to reconnect food systems with ecosystems. Every bite counts!
15. Vote. Elections have consequences. Enforcement of, and support and funding for, the Endangered Species Act are among those consequences.
16. Walk or take the bus. Twice a week instead of driving. It’s almost a 30% reduction in gasoline use. Install solar panels. Cheaper than ever.
17. Be present: be aware; claim personal power; speak up for processes that sustain all life; join others; practice democracy.
18. Let everyone you know into the “secret” that you spend a heck of a lot of time outdoors. Teach by example, by touch and feel and breath, that outdoors and indoors must flow into one another.
19. Establish wilderness areas that allow no access whatsoever for any reason to human beings and rethink urban development to reduce spread.
20. Reinstate environmental policies that are being eroded little by little for profits. Work hard for cleaner air and water and direct all monies collected from polluters into conservation projects.
21. Slow down, scale down, group up!

]]>http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/saving-wild-species-habitats/feed/0Win a free copy of THE SIXTH EXTINCTIONhttp://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/win-free-copy-sixth-extinction/
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/win-free-copy-sixth-extinction/#commentsFri, 09 Jan 2015 00:00:34 +0000http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/?p=102Elizabeth Kolbert will be speaking at OSU, Monday, February 2, 7 pm at the LaSells Stewart Center. Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. Her series on global warming, The Climate of Man, from which the book was adapted,… Continue reading →

Elizabeth Kolbert will be speaking at OSU, Monday, February 2, 7 pm at the LaSells Stewart Center. Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. Her series on global warming, The Climate of Man, from which the book was adapted, won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award and a National Academies communications award. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner. She is also a recipient of a Heinz Award and Guggenheim Fellowship. Kolbert lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

In anticipation of Elizabeth Kolbert’s reading, Spring Creek is giving away three hardback copies of Kolbert’s powerful new book The Sixth Extinction. Here’s how to enter: 1. “Like” the Spring Creek Project on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/springcreekproject?ref=bookmarks 2. Leave a comment on our Facebook page telling us (in 20 words or less) one thing we can all do to help stem the loss of wild species and their habitats.

The three best suggestions will get a copy of The Sixth Extinction. The deadline is Tuesday, January 13, 5 p.m.

If you are not on Facebook, you can email your comment to Erica Trabold, Spring Creek Project Intern: trabolde@onid.orst.edu

* * * Here are some links to a few of our favorite recent articles by her:

About “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.” Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In prose that is at once frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind’s most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.

We continue with our posts on our year-long topic, “Humans and Other Wild Animals,” with a piece from Brian Doyle’s presciently titled new book, Children and Other Wild Animals. Brian will read Tuesday, October 21, 7:30 pm in the OSU Valley Library Rotunda. Should be a wild time.

A Newt Note

— Brian Doyle

One time, years ago, I was shuffling with my children through the vast wet moist dripping enormous thicketed webbed muddy epic forest on the Oregon coast, which is a forest from a million years ago, the forest that hatched the biggest creatures that ever lived on this bruised blessed earth, all due respect to California and its redwood trees but our cedars and firs made them redwoods look like toothpicks, and my kids and I were in a biggest-creature mood, because we had found slugs waaay longer than bananas, and footprints of elk that must have been gobbling steroids, and a friend had just told us of finding a bear print the size of a dinner plate, and all of us had seen whales in the sea that very morning, and all of us had seen pelicans too which look like flying pup tents, and how do they know to all hit cruise control at the same time, does the leader give a hand signal? as my son said, and one of us had seen the two ginormous young eagles who lived somewhere in this forest, so when we found the biggest stump in the history of the world, as my daughter called it, we were not exactly surprised, it was basically totally understandable that suddenly there would be a stump so enormous that it was like someone had dropped a dance floor into the forest, that’s the sort of thing that happens in this forest, and my kids of course immediately leapt up on it and started shaking their groove thangs, and dancing themselves silly, and I was snorting with laughter until one kid, the goofiest, why we did not name this kid Goofy when we had the chance in those first few dewy minutes of life I will never know, well, this kid of course shimmed over to the edge and fell off head over teakettle, vanishing into a mat of fern nearly as tall as me, but the reason I tell you this story is that while we were all down in the moist velvet dark of the roots of the ferns, trying to be solicitious about Goofy and see if he was busted anywhere serious but also trying not to laugh and whisper the word doofus, one of us found a newt! O my god! dad! check it out!

Of course the newt, rattled at the attention, peed on the kid who held it, and of course that led to screeching and hilarity, and of course on the way home we saw damselflies mating, which also led to screeching and hilarity, but the point of this story isn’t pee or lust, however excellent a story about pee or lust would be. It’s that one day when my kids and I were shuffling through the vast wet moist forest we saw so many wonders and miracles that not one of us ever forgot any of the wonders and miracles we saw, and we saw tiny shreds and shards of the ones that are there, and what kind of greedy criminal thug thieves would we be as a people and a species if we didn’t spend every iota of our cash and creativity to protect and preserve a world in which kids wander around gaping in wonder and hoping nothing else rubbery and astonishing will pee on them? You know what I mean?

]]>http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/newt-note/feed/0The Girl with the Cockleburs in Her Hairhttp://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/girl-cockleburs-hair/
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/girl-cockleburs-hair/#commentsTue, 14 Oct 2014 21:15:31 +0000http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/?p=84Humans are wild animals, too, though we forget or deny it most of the time. Lepidopterist, essayist, and poet Robert Michael Pyle knows a human-animal when he sees one, and celebrates her. The Girl with the Cockleburs in Her Hair by Robert Michael Pyle We were talking about how children don’t get out any… Continue reading →

]]>http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/girl-cockleburs-hair/feed/0What do animals mean to the contemporary imagination?http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/animals-mean-contemporary-imagination/
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/animals-mean-contemporary-imagination/#commentsTue, 07 Oct 2014 20:08:48 +0000http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/?p=78 by Alison Hawthorne Deming Animals surrounded our ancestors. Animals were their food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and their gods. In the Paleolithic period of the Great Hunt, Joseph Campbell writes, “man’s ubiquitous nearest neighbors were the beasts in their various species; it was those animals who were his teachers, illustrating in their manners… Continue reading →

Animals surrounded our ancestors. Animals were their food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and their gods. In the Paleolithic period of the Great Hunt, Joseph Campbell writes, “man’s ubiquitous nearest neighbors were the beasts in their various species; it was those animals who were his teachers, illustrating in their manners of life the powers and patternings of nature.” In this age of mass extinction and the industrialization of life, it is hard to touch the skin of this long and deep companionship. Now we surround the animals and crowd them from their homes. They are the core of what we are as creatures, sharing a biological world and inhabiting our inner lives, though most days they feel peripheral—a wag from the dog, an ankle embrace from the cat, the pleasure of sighting a house finch feeding outside the window, the thrill of spotting a hedgehog waddling along a park path in Prague or a fox trotting across the urban campus in Denver. Animality and humanity are one, expressions of the planet’s brilliant inventiveness, and yet the animals are leaving the world and not returning.

What do animals mean to the contemporary imagination? We do not know. Or we have forgotten. Or we are too busy to notice. Or we experience psychic numbing to cope with the scale of extinctions and we feel nothing. Or we begin through our grief to realize how much we love our fellow creatures and we tend to them. Or we write about them, trying to figure what the experience of animals is and how they came to be so ingrained in human mind and emotion, to remember what it feels like to be embedded in the family of animals, to see the ways animals inhabit and limn our lives, entering our days and nights, unannounced and essential.

–from ZOOLOGIES, Milkweed Editions, 2014

Alison Hawthorne Deming and Robert Michael Pyle will read together, Thursday, October 16, 7:30 pm at the Corvallis Arts Center, 700 SW Madison, Corvallis. The reading is free and open to all.

Alison Hawthorne Deming (Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit) and Robert Michael Pyle (Evolution of the GenusIris) debut their new books. Alison Deming is the author of Science and Other Poems, Temporary Homelands, The Edges of the Civilized World, finalist for the PEN Center West Award, and Writing the Sacred Into the Real. She edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology and coedited with Lauret E. Savoy The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World. Bob Pyle is the author of Wintergreen, The Thunder Tree,Where Bigfoot Walks, Chasing Monarchs,Walking the High Ridge, Sky Time in Gray’s River, and Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year; as well as The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, The Butterflies of Cascadia. Free and open to all.

]]>http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/animals-mean-contemporary-imagination/feed/0Ten Lessons for Climate Activists from the American Robinhttp://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/ten-lessons-climate-activists-american-robin/
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/ten-lessons-climate-activists-american-robin/#commentsWed, 01 Oct 2014 21:14:41 +0000http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/?p=70editor’s note: at the Blue River Gathering of Pacific Northwest nature writers last weekend, held at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, we invited the writers to share thoughts on what humans might learn from other-than-human animals. Here’s our first post in the series: Ten Lessons for Climate Activists from the American Robin by Pepper Trail… Continue reading →

editor’s note: at the Blue River Gathering of Pacific Northwest nature writers last weekend, held at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, we invited the writers to share thoughts on what humans might learn from other-than-human animals. Here’s our first post in the series:

Ten Lessons for Climate Activists from the American Robin by Pepper Trail

1. It’s good to be common

The American Robin is one of the most common and widely distributed native birds in North America. This large population gives robins great resilience in the face of ecological and climatic challenges.

Build the movement!

2. Adapt to where you are

Robins are found from steamy southern swamps to the Alaskan tundra. Their remarkable ability to adapt to local conditions and resources is the secret of their success.

Tailor your message and manner to local conditions

3. And also have one special skill

For all their adaptability, robins also have a specialized skill: their earthworm-hunting behavior, which opens up a rich resource few other birds exploit.

Know your special talent and make the most of it

4. Figure out how to take advantage of the dominant paradigm

Robins thrive in part because of their ability to make the most of human environments, nesting in our backyards and foraging on our lawns.

Don’t be afraid to make alliances and to engage with mass media

5. Be alert for phonies

Robins are among the few birds able to detect and toss out the eggs of the parasitical Brown-headed Cowbird, thus protecting their nests from invaders.

Welcome only those who truly share your values

6. Know when to move on

Throughout their wide range, robins exhibit facultative migration – that is, they adjust their winter residency to conditions. In a cold winter, they head south; if the next year is mild, they may remain resident all year.

Know when to stage a tactical retreat, in order to win another time

7. Produce lots of young

Robins often produce two broods of offspring per year. That gives them a huge advantage compared to less fecund species.

There’s no substitute for the energy and idealism of the young when building a movement.

8. Be confident

Robins are often described as “bold,” “confident,” and “confiding,” in contrast to related birds like the shy Varied Thrush. There is no doubt that the outgoing behavior of robins has contributed greatly to their success.

Believe in your cause whole-heartedly, and others will too.

9. Be friendly

In addition to their boldness, robins appeal to us because they’re friendly – even if they’re keeping us company in the garden in order to snatch up earthworms!

A friendly, positive approach will gain many more listeners than one wrapped in doom and gloom.

10. Sing!

The song of robins is beautiful. And isn’t a beautiful message what we all want to hear?

]]>http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/ten-lessons-climate-activists-american-robin/feed/1The Wilderness Act at 50http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/wilderness-act-50/
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/wilderness-act-50/#commentsTue, 20 May 2014 21:54:32 +0000http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/?p=63by Joshua McGuffie* What images does wilderness evoke? For many, wilderness means pristine landscapes, scenic vistas, quietude, and wide open spaces. Many Americans may be surprised to know that, legally, wilderness has only been enshrined as a public reality for 50 years. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, surrounded by an unlikely… Continue reading →

What images does wilderness evoke? For many, wilderness means pristine landscapes, scenic vistas, quietude, and wide open spaces. Many Americans may be surprised to know that, legally, wilderness has only been enshrined as a public reality for 50 years. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, surrounded by an unlikely coalition of elected officials and preservationists. To celebrate the Wilderness Act’s 50th anniversary, Oregon State University’s Spring Creek Project hosted a panel discussion on 2 May to consider the Act’s genesis, life, and future.

Dr. Jacob Hamblin discussed important environmental moments leading up to the act. He particularly singled out public outcry over the Bureau of Reclamation’s Echo Park Project. The Bureau planned to build a series of dams along the Colorado, including within Grand Canyon National Park. Hamblin argued that potential incursions into ‘protected’ federal lands raised popular environmental consciousness and incentivized politicians to support preservation measures. With this background in mind, he asked the question “Is it possible to have a community of sincerity without common purpose?” That the Wilderness Act passed, with a variety of definitions for ‘wilderness’ built into its text, seems to indicate that such a community did in fact coalesce in the early 1960’s.

Next, Dr. Lisa Machnik, from the US Forest Service, discussed wilderness from a federal agency perspective. She began her remarks by quoting President Johnson, “If future generations are to remember us with gratitude rather than contempt, we must leave them something more than the miracles of technology.” She zeroed in on federal agencies’ wilderness conundrum. If wilderness is meant to be “undeveloped” and to “retain its primeval character,” then how is it to be managed. Management, especially in the adept hands of federal specialists, implies the opposite of “primeval.” Administrative tension aside, Machnik closed her remarks with the affirmation the 110 million acres of wilderness in the US offers the the general public perspective in the midst of contemporary life.

Finally, Craig Childs shared his wilderness wanderings with the group. An author and educator, Childs has dedicated much of his life to being outside. In search of wild spaces, he has gone on multi-day treks through corn monocultures and rambled, carefully, across federal bombing ranges. Offering some perspective from these trips, he remarked “my definition of wilderness doesn’t fall within the wilderness act, it’s all over the place…” Childs used the image of the Hawaiian kipuka, an island of forest surrounded by a lava flow, to challenge the audience’s notion of wilderness. Our humanness, he claimed, may indeed reside in the wilderness islands increasingly surrounded by the flow of human development.

At 50, the Wilderness Act clearly inspires an array of images and stories. Listening to an academic, bureaucratic, and artistic treatment of the Act one after the other, I wonder if part of what makes it robust is its breadth. The Wilderness Act embraces the subject/object divide, seeking to preserve wilderness for its own sake and for the sake of “primitive and unconfined” human enjoyment. Nature and humanity stand side by side in this legislation, giving their own meanings to wild spaces. There’s much built into the Wilderness Act. 50 years has already raised up a great deal to be experienced and studied.

*Joshua McGuffie is pursuing a Master of Arts in History of Science at Oregon State University.

]]>http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/wilderness-act-50/feed/0Submit Your Trillium Project Applications by April 1http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/submit-trillium-project-applications-april-1/
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/submit-trillium-project-applications-april-1/#commentsThu, 13 Mar 2014 20:56:51 +0000http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/?p=59There is no cell phone or internet service at Shotpouch Cabin, but there are trilliums and delphinium and wild iris. We’d like to invite you to unplug and enjoy the wildflower season at Shotpouch by submitting a proposal for the Trillium Project. The Trillium Project is a residency program that focuses on the Cabin and the… Continue reading →

There is no cell phone or internet service at Shotpouch Cabin, but there are trilliums and delphinium and wild iris. We’d like to invite you to unplug and enjoy the wildflower season at Shotpouch by submitting a proposal for the Trillium Project.

The Trillium Project is a residency program that focuses on the Cabin and the Shotpouch land. The Cabin is a lovely cedar and glass retreat on 45 acres of forest and meadows in the Coast Range near Burnt Woods, and it is the location for many Spring Creek events and writers-in-residency programs. The Cabin is also an idea, a set of values, a nature reserve, and a work in progress.

We are inviting proposals from people with a variety of backgrounds and interests—artists, botanists, biologists, writers, musicians, philosophers, etc.—to study and write about the Shotpouch place itself, its history or philosophy or bird species or wildflowers or mosses or limnology or trout or soundscape. People are invited to visit the Cabin for half a day or stay up to three days.

Our vision for the Project is that people will come and go from the Cabin, exploring the creek, meadows, and upland forests, encountering new people and new ideas as they go about their explorations. Our hope is that as people find inspiration and information in this special place, they will also find interest in their encounters with others who are equally involved with the land. And so people will create passing collaborations, share their perspectives and expertise, and learn to see the land through a variety of eyes.

]]>http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/submit-trillium-project-applications-april-1/feed/0Le Guin and Robinson: Inspired Social Visionarieshttp://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/le-guin-robinson-inspired-social-visionaries/
http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/le-guin-robinson-inspired-social-visionaries/#commentsTue, 11 Feb 2014 21:48:40 +0000http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/springcreekproject/?p=46Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson are two of the greatest writers of our time, period. Though their works are often categorized as ‘science fiction’ they may be better regarded as social visionaries. They have created imaginary worlds to explore elaborately detailed “what if” scenarios, using all the tools of memorable writing—image, plot, character,… Continue reading →

Ursula Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson are two of the greatest writers of our time, period. Though their works are often categorized as ‘science fiction’ they may be better regarded as social visionaries. They have created imaginary worlds to explore elaborately detailed “what if” scenarios, using all the tools of memorable writing—image, plot, character, attention to the nuances of language–to fashion profound literary works. Along the way they’ve won national awards, including Hugos and Nebulas galore, and a huge and faithful readership.

Although they are long-time friends they have never, to the best of their recollection, read together. So it will be a very special evening indeed when Le Guin and Robinson appear together at “Transformation without Apocalypse,” Saturday, February 15, 7:30 pm.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of links to prime your interest:

In a New Yorker review of Kim Stanley Robinson’s work titled, “Our Greatest Political Novelist?” Tim Kreider writes: “Our culture is adrift between stories right now—the old ones we lived on for thousands of years aren’t working anymore, and we haven’t come up with new ones to replace them yet. It’s natural for us to see ourselves as being at history’s endpoint, since, so far, we are, but part of science fiction’s job is to remind us that it’s early yet, we’re still a primitive people, the Golden Age may lie ahead. In an era filled with complacent dystopias and escapist apocalypses, Robinson is one of our best, bravest, most moral, and most hopeful storytellers. It’s no coincidence that so many of his novels have as their set pieces long, punishing treks through unforgiving country with diminishing provisions, his characters exhausted and despondent but forcing themselves to slog on. What he’s telling us over and over, like the voice of the Third Wind whispering when all seems lost, is that it’s not too late, don’t get scared, don’t give up, we’re almost there, we can do this, we just have to keep going.” Read the entire insightful piece HERE.

Ursula LeGuin was recently featured in a Paris Review interview. It’s a fascinating romp. Early on Le Guin says, “But where I can get prickly and combative is if I’m just called a sci-fi writer. I’m not. I’m a novelist and poet. Don’t shove me into your damn pigeonhole, where I don’t fit, because I’m all over. My tentacles are coming out of the pigeonhole in all directions.”Read the whole tentacular piece HERE.